Continuous processes have been highlighted at many recent conferences.  A short article from Sushma Davison of Britest explains how to decide between batch and continuous processes (The Chemical Engineer, July 2008, p43) but is lacking in real world examples. A better summary, which featured some of the continuous processes presented at Scientific Update’s Scale Up of Chemical Processes Boston conference in 2007, appeared in Speciality Chemicals Magazine, (April 2008, pp40-46) For those wishing to see examples of continuous processing in pharma intermediates, readers are referred to the splendid article by Thomas LaPorte of BMS in Current Opinion in Drug Discovery and Development, 2007, 10, 738-745 and the references cited therein.

The group of Ley at Cambridge have also recently published a paper on continuous fluorination using DAST (Baumann M et al, Synlett, 2008, 2111-2114)

By the time you read this newsletter, the special issue of Organic Process R&D on continuous processes will be available in print and the web edition should be available earlier (Sept-Oct 2008 issue).  In this issue there are some excellent practical papers on this trendy topic.